Display monitors enable people to view images generated by electronic devices. Individuals and businesses rely heavily on electronic images for business operations, information, socialization and entertainment. This mainstream reliance and demand for images continues to grow at a rapid pace.
In response, there has been a mass adoption of electronic devices of various types, including outdoor flat monitors, wall-mounted televisions, computers and mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. It is common for a home to have several wall-mounted, flat screen televisions, several computers and a smartphone for each household member. It is also common for facilities, such as manufacturing plants, central command centers and hospitals, to have arrays of wall-mounted monitors for use by employees. Furthermore, it is common for downtown city areas to have numerous, outdoor flat monitors mounted to the outsides of commercial buildings. These outdoor monitors display advertisements and entertaining graphics.
There is substantial, financial cost caused by the complexity of having to procure, install, use, manage and support so many different types of electronic devices. The complexity of having to use many different types of devices can also cause emotional stress to the end users.
An attempt has been made to consolidate display functions on a common, known medium, window glass. There is a known type of window liquid crystal display (LCD) glass that incorporates an LCD unit. The user can control the LCD glass to switch between an opaque mode and a transparent mode. However, the LCD glass is not operable to suitably generate images which are viewable. This is because the LCD glass does not incorporate a backlight device necessary to properly illuminate the LCD unit. Adding a backlight device and backlight diffuser would destroy the transparency of the LCD glass. Consequently, the user must use an additional, external device to provide illumination for an image to complement the LCD glass. Therefore, it is relatively expensive and costly to use the LCD glass as a monitor. Furthermore, having to mount, adjust and maintain the external devices can cause reliability problems, labor burdens and costs.
For a monitor, itself, to serve as a building window, it must be transparent. There are known monitors which are partially transparent. One such monitor has a transparent organic light emitting diode (OLED) module. The OLED module can provide transparency in one mode and generate a visible image in another mode. Another known monitor has a clear layer of plastic embedded with nanoparticles. This monitor has a laser generator which can direct a laser beam at each separate nanoparticle. This causes the nanoparticles to emit light for generating a visible image. However, these known monitors require control of the discrete image-generating elements, the OLED pixels and the nanoparticles. This level of discrete control consumes a relatively high amount of processing power and requires relatively complex electronics, such as the OLED technology and the laser beam generator. This demand for power and complexity can make it relatively expensive and burdensome to procure, install and maintain these type of monitors. Also, the relative high complexity makes these monitors prone to breakdowns and subject to reliability problems. For these reasons, attempting to use these types of monitors as building windows would be a relatively high risk effort with burdensome costs and technical disadvantages.
The foregoing background describes some, but not necessarily all, of the problems, disadvantages and shortcomings related to the known LCD glass and monitors having transparency.